In today's competitive marketplace it is important to maintain manufacturing costs at a minimum. This includes reducing costs associated with the manufacture of the goods as well as with the packaging of the goods and the like. Packaging costs, of course, include the costs of the materials required to make the package (e.g., paper, plastic, adhesive and the like) and costs associated with packaging defects (e.g., materials that must be discarded due to unacceptable strength, appearance or the like).
Laminated products have largely replaced natural materials in the construction of furniture, cabinets, countertops, interior doors and the like, due in large part to the strength, durability, decorativeness and cost of these products. Such products are typically prepared by bonding a surface material to a core material using an adhesive, and application of heat and/or pressure. Interior doors and countertops, for example, are conventionally manufactured by bonding a hardboard door facing or other conventional surface material to a particleboard or other conventional frame or core material.
While liquid solvent-based adhesives and aqueous liquid adhesives have been used to bond substrate materials, these adhesives have a number of disadvantages associated with their use. Solvent-based adhesives pose environmental and health hazards and are difficult to handle. Aqueous liquid adhesives require significant drying times, require long set or cure times, and the water contained within them tends to swell surface and/or core materials leading to warpage.
Water-based adhesives are commonly used to manufacture paper, multi-wall and specialty bags. In the manufacture of bags, a water-based adhesive is generally applied to a substrate and then mated to another similar or dissimilar substrate to form a fold or multi-layered structure. While water-based adhesives have been used in the manufacture of bags, water-based adhesives require significant drying times and the water contained within them often causes the substrates to warp, wrinkle, curl or bend. A similar situation exists in non-paper laminating fields, such as decorative laminating. In these fields, higher bonding performance is often required, such as water resistance for exterior use of the final products.
There is a continuing need for improved adhesives and coating compositions that can be used to provide protective coatings or used to adhesive bond together laminated articles. The described invention addresses this need by providing coating compositions and adhesives that are high performance, safe, effective, and, in addition, provides substantial cost savings.